Elizabeth James is the co-author of 2021’s A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality and of 2016’s Method to the Madness: A Common Core Guide to Creating Critical Thinkers through the Study of Literature. She teaches at the high school and college levels and provides professional development for English teachers. She and B.H. James share two wonderful sons.
Books
A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality
A Sea of Troubles has been designed for classroom teachers struggling to address the overwhelming issues facing our world today. By embracing the Common Core’s emphasis on the inclusion of more nonfiction, informational texts, the authors have demonstrated how to incorporate meaningful informational texts into their favorite units of literature. A Sea of Troubles shows teachers how literature and informational texts can work together, to enhance each other, and, by extension, enhance student’s abilities to critically think and respond to the sea of troubles that pervades society.
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Publication Date: May 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4758-5751-1
Method to the Madness: A Common Core Guide to Creating Critical Thinkers through the Study of Literature
This book is ideal for the thousands of teachers who entered the profession in the last ten years and taught prescribed curriculum geared toward end of year bubble testing. Its intent is to empower districts and their teachers to create their own (free!) curriculum that will exceed the expectations of Common Core assessments, as well as create life-long learners that are college and career ready. By employing inquiry based units of study that insist on the use of iconic literature at the center, students will be more prepared for what awaits them with Common Core exams.
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Publication Date: March 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4758-2538-1
Reviews
A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality
Are you keen to explore contemporary issues with students but more than a little bored with the titles in your curriculum? Sea of Troubles offers a model for re-envisioning how traditional texts are taught. Elizabeth and B.H. James describe instructional moves designed to demonstrate how literature “reflects the world and the world is reflected in fiction.” Whether you teach online or in person, their lessons integrating informational readings with literary works are sure to enliven classroom conversations.
— Carol Jago, past president, National Council of Teachers of English; author, “The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis”
Elizabeth and B.H. James have written an elegant, sophisticated, and eminently useable text that English teachers will find energizing to read, even if they don’t teach the texts under consideration. Not only do the pair offer us new ways to both think about some of the most commonly-taught texts (Merchant, Raisin, Mockingbird) and teach these texts in conversation with nonfiction, but they do so in a way that is respectful and deeply optimistic about the possibility that English teachers might use literature to arm students with the skills to meet the sea of troubles that is our world and write the new book that we all need.
— Audrey Fisch and Susan Chenelle, authors of the “Using Informational Texts” series
This book is designed to begin a very needed conversation in our classrooms today about social, racial, and gender inequities, done in the hope to help heal our nation of its acquiescence toward injustices that surround us today, guiding teachers to help students articulate and connect their own lived experiences to find meaning and relevance in the textbooks on the shelf. As we hope students forge their own ‘brave new world,’ the lessons in this book will activate the innate student and teenage desire to question and challenge the world around them, to state what goes unsaid about power and control in their own lives, to see the function of literature as more than an academic exercise, but as a call to embrace the full humanity of every human being.
— Natalia Trevino, author of VirginX and Lavando La Dirty Laundry
Always student-centered, Elizabeth and B.H. James marry their cutting-edge call to pair literary and informational texts with concrete activities and assignments that are ready for the classroom. Activating old texts canonized in Common Core Standards for of-our-moment conversations, they show othering—where one gender, race, religion, or identity is stigmatized—to be a central, troubling feature of both literature and life. That agenda-setting insight opens doors for students to learn of bigotry today via Shakespeare, redlining in Chicago via A Raisin in the Sun, authoritarianism in 2020 via 1984, and structural sexism via The Handmaid’s Tale.
— Jeffrey R. Wilson, author of Shakespeare and Trump
Method to the Madness: A Common Core Guide to Creating Critical Thinkers through the Study of Literature
As we know, it’s up to our high schools and the English teachers in them to figure out how to develop the critical thinking and deeper learning promised by the new set of English language arts skills that most states have adopted. Method to the Madness provides details for high school English teachers in any high school on the rigorous reading and literature curriculum the authors worked out for “credit recovery” classes in a California magnet high school, as well as the discussion questions and essay-writing activities they used to engage their students and develop their college readiness skills. What are some of the complex literary and non-literary texts English teachers can use for students like those in the James’s cred recovery classes? Read Method to the Madness and find out what worked for these authors.
— Dr. Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita, University of Arkansas
There are three tests for any book designed to help teachers be better teachers: first and foremost is how carefully it maintains a focus on the students’ experience in the room; second, how well it lays out practical solutions to the ever-present challenge of keeping the teachers’ workloads manageable; and finally, how well it can defend itself to the current education standards. Elizabeth and Bill James’ book Method to the Madness: A Common Core Guide to Creating Critical Thinkers through the Study of Literature passes all these tests, and even rocks the bonus question: How can we get our students to read and understand challenging literature? This is, in the end, an excellent textbook about teaching kids to think.
— Karen Gettert Shoemaker, PhD, author of “The Meaning of Names”
Elizabeth James 